Dr. Anne Foerst - Gods and Humans and Androids, Oh My!

What will it be like to coexist alongside intelligent robots? What will be the differences—and similiarities—between us and them? How does the emerging potential of AI (Artificial Intelligence) impact the way we need to think about spirituality and, indeed, what it means to be a human being? These are the intriguing questions that Anne Foerst, research scientist and theologian, endeavored to answer while working with members of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as they sought to create a robotic analogue of a human infant. Join EnlightenNext's Igal Moria as he speaks with Foerst about the nature of consciousness, religion, immortality and how the quest to create humanoid robots will intensify the challenges and complexity facing human society in the years to come.

BIO

Dr. Anne Foerst is Professor of Theology and Computer Science and Director of Nexus: The Science and Religion Dialogue Project at St. Bonaventure University. Previously, she has worked as research scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was also affiliated with the Center for the Studies of Values in Public Life of Harvard Divinity School. While in the artificial intelligence lab at MIT, Foerst served as theological advisor for the Cog and Kismet projects, two attempts to develop embodied, autonomous social robots that resemble human infants in their ability to learn and develop more mature intelligence levels.

Dr. Foerst initiated and directs "God and Computers," a dialogue project initially between Harvard Divinity School, the Boston Theological Institute, and MIT, and now to be continued at St. Bonaventure. In this function, she has organized several public lecture series and public conferences on Artificial Intelligence, computer science and concepts on personhood and dignity.

Dr. Foerst has published papers in academic journals on the possibility for mutual enrichment between Artificial Intelligence, the Cognitive Sciences, and Jewish and Christian theologies and anthropologies. She also writes for popular media to bring the question on religion and science to a broader audience. Her research centers mostly on questions of embodiment and social interaction as central elements in human cognition, on questions of personhood and dignity, and on how to bring theology back into the public discourse in secularized, high-tech Western cultures. Foerst is contributing editor for the quarterly magazine Spirituality & Health and is the author of God In the Machine: What Robots Teach Us About Humanity and God.

Foerst holds degrees in computer science and philosophy from the University of Bonn, Germany, a master of divinity degree from the Seminary of the Protestant Church in Rhineland, and a Ph.D. in theology from the Ruhr-University at Bochum, Germany.